The Post-Western Offshore System: Regulatory Fragmentation and the Rise of New Financial Secrecy Hubs

Context

The 2016 Panama Papers leak exposed the global offshore system's role in facilitating tax evasion, illicit financial flows, and kleptocracy, sparking international political scandals and new transparency initiatives. Yet nearly a decade later, the post-Panama Papers era has produced neither a coherent international regulatory regime to manage offshore finance nor robust global norms to challenge its centrality in the global financial architecture. Instead, it has been characterized by growing regulatory divergence within the West—with Europe adopting incremental transparency reforms while the second Trump administration dismantles U.S. enforcement—and geographic shifts away from Western jurisdictions toward emerging offshore hubs in Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. This Alliance project– led by researchers at Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought and Sciences Po’s CERI– will examine how the global offshore system is evolving amid this regulatory fragmentation and broader geopolitical reconfigurations. It addresses three core questions: How has the offshore system adapted since the Panama Papers? What roles do transnational professional enablers play in sustaining this evolving secrecy infrastructure across democratic and authoritarian contexts? What methods are needed to research these dynamics effectively? Understanding these dynamics is essential for grasping how contemporary globalization, governance, and inequality are being fundamentally reconfigured.